Advice

‘The Best Way to Hack Your Lunch Salad, According to 11 Food Experts’

Lots of great tips here in this Grub Street piece. I like Garrison Price’s:

“If I’m hungry and pressed for time after a workout, my go-to is usually Sweetgreen. My own salad concoctions revolve around arugula (spicy), romaine (crunchy), raw beets (high in folate), broccoli (anti-inflammatory), sunflower seeds (vitamin E), almonds (biotin), avocado (B5), and spicy cashew dressing (healthy fat). I’m obsessed with seeds and nuts because they are good for you and filling, but also add great texture to the salad.”

Texture is king in a salad, and I feel like most places leave the croutons to bear the burden. I think seeds and nuts are crucial, and second only to the dressing. I usually add hummus to thicken mine up and give it a bit more body too.

”This is small talk purgatory’: what Tinder taught me about love’

I love this CJ Hauser’s piece for The Guardian where she talks about dating now. Over the last year, my life has been lived through the lens of eating, and because of it, everything I read now somehow reads as an analog to food. In this great piece, Hauser has this beautiful bit (with emphasis mine) about a competition where robots attempt to fool humans into believing they’re real people—and how dating can sometimes feel that way:

I knew a little bit about how to proceed with my Tinder Turing tests from one of my favourite books – one I was teaching at the time: The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian. In this book, which I have read five times, Christian goes to participate in the world’s most famous Turing test, the Loebner prize in Brighton. He serves as a human blind, chatting with people through an interface, who then have to decide whether he is a human or a chatbot. The true point of the Loebner prize is to see whether any of the chatbots can convince the judges of their humanity – but as Christian’s title suggests, there is also a jokey prize offered to the human blind who the fewest participants mistake for a robot. Receiving the Most Human Human award was Christian’s goal. In the book, he asks: what could a human do with language that a robot could not? What are the ways of expressing ourselves which are the most surprisingly human? How do we recognise our fellow humans on the other side of the line? And so, as I attempted to find the lovely and interesting people I was sure were lurking behind the platitudes the average Tinder chat entails, I asked myself Christian’s question: how could I both be a person who understood she was online, on Tinder, but still communicate like a humane human being? What could I do that a robot couldn’t?

In the same way Brian Christian wants to be the Most Human Human, I sometimes think about what it takes for a meal to transcend food. There are many questions that play in this thinking. As a writer of books, I used to fantasize about ways of putting my books into people’s hands when they’re most ready for it.

As I think about food now, more questions come to mind. Do we like who we are with? Is it our version of Proust’s tea and madeleines? Have we felt loved or had sex recently, or is what’s on our plate our primary source for satisfaction? Can we make it ourselves? Have we tried to make something like it? Does it conceal time? Is it cheap—but feel like a luxury? Can we share it? Does it make us think of someone we admire?

It goes on:

The chapter I have always loved most in Christian’s book is the one about Garry Kasparov “losing” at chess to Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer. Christian explains the chess concept of playing “in book”. In short, the book is the known series of chess moves that should be played in sequence to optimise success. In most high-level chess matches, the first part of any game is played “in book” and a smart observer will know which moves will follow which until a certain amount of complexity and chaos necessitates improvisation – at which point the players begin to play in earnest. Some might say, as themselves. Kasparov holds that he did not lose to Deep Blue because the game was still in book when he made his fatal error and so, while he flubbed the script, he never truly even played against the algorithmic mind of his opponent.

In this chapter, Christian makes a brilliant comparison between most polite conversation, small talk, and “the book”, arguing that true human interaction doesn’t start happening until one or both of the participants diverge from their scripts of culturally defined pleasantries. The book is necessary in some ways, as it is in chess (Bobby Fischer would disagree), in order to launch us into these deeper, realer conversations. But it is all too easy to have an entire conversation without leaving the book these days – to talk without accessing the other person’s specific humanity.

And it’s the same with our meals, where deviation and routine mix to create magic—one bite at a time.

‘No One Is Ever Vegan Enough for the Vegan Police’

Darcy Reeder for Tenderly:

When we try to catch each other on vegan technicalities, we’re just tearing down potential allies. Our world is big and complicated and no amount of personal effort will lead to 100% vegan purity. For example, the steel and rubber in cars (and bikes!) are usually made with animal fats.

So let’s acknowledge no one can live perfectly, but that’s not a reason to give up. We can do the best we can while realizing that an obsession with purity (especially when directed at others) reads as classist. I chose the store-brand cookies over the organic, definitely no-bone char ones because I was trying to (survive in Seattle and) feed a party full of people while earning $10/hour. I earned that low wage working as the pastry chef at a vegan restaurant, where the owner prioritized no-bone char sugar, but didn’t pay employees a living wage.

The Vegan Police’s classism shows up in other ways too. Maybe some vegans can afford new, vegan shoes, while other vegans will keep wearing the leather shoes they owned before going vegan. Can’t we agree both choices are valid?

This article speaks to many of the problems in veganism, which can be classist, sexist, and racist. As a vegan, I try to celebrate any carnivore using animals less in any way. More veggies, less butter, less meat. All of these steps are going in a good direction. And I apply the same approach with people doing their best to be vegan. We have to understand that it’s intentionally difficult to discern what is and isn’t vegan. Labeling is scarce (though getting better!) and reading the ingredient lists can be undecipherable.

All we can do is our best.

‘A Mexican Vegan and The Five Stages of Food Grief’

Nicole Valadez with a personal reflection on being Mexican and going vegan:

My biggest problem was waiting for me back in Houston where I’d have to face my very traditional Mexican family and tell them that I could no longer indulge in our Thanksgiving feast. I wondered if I should just skip the holidays all together – postpone my big news until the new year and hide out in D.C., far away from judging eyes. But missing a Mexican holiday, let alone two, would be even worse than becoming the family’s first vegan.

And then she follows with the 5 stages of what I call “hungr-ief” and the discussion that ensues. For anyone out there afraid to explore, every year it gets a little better. The same thing happened with my family and if we all give a little it goes a long way. I try to make extra food and share it with as many people as I can. After all, Thanksgiving is about gathering together—with whatever food feels right for you.

‘Veggie-First Eating, and Thinking’

Alexandra Weiss for the NYTimes:

Veggie Mijas is a collective of over 300 nonbinary, female-identifying people and women of color in 12 chapters across the United States, and the group — originally founded by Amy Quichiz and Mariah Bermeo — facilitates community building through vegan potlucks, cleaning up community gardens and hosting youth seminars to teach children about the importance of growing their own food.

“Veggie Mijas is about reclaiming what a plant-based lifestyle looks like, which isn’t just about not eating meat,” said Ms. Quichiz, 24, a native of Queens, N.Y., who is Peruvian and Colombian. “It’s about what we can do for our communities, and about reflecting on the systems around us that impact the choices that we make.”

I’ve written about Veggie Mijas before, but I wanted to post this larger and longer story. This has some nice tips for new vegans from queer and people-of-color communities.